Diagnosis
by ScareyQuinette
Summary: When Harley Quinn is sent to Arkham, Jonathan Crane must diagnose his former flame. Based on a prompt from wouldyouliketoseemymask. Complete!
1. Harleen Come Home

Based on the prompt 'Diagnosis' from awesome writer wouldyouliketoseemymask. I own none of the characters.

**Diagnosis - Chapter 1**

Dr Jonathan Crane straightened his tie as he walked. His shirt was crumpled from two days' wear and his hair was getting greasy but he hardly had the time to sleep, never mind the time to preen. The week following the Joker's arrest had been a dramatic one, and not just because the prized prisoner had escaped within twelve hours. Even without the clown in custody, the GPD had struggled, and so they had relied on their most abused ally to help them out. Now Crane had fifty of the Joker's most loyal men to sift through to find the genuine crazies amongst the fakes hoping to escape jail. Most took the best of five minutes to evaluate but Crane knew the next name on his list would not be so simple.

Quinzel, Harleen F.

It was funny how her title had been erased from her file now she was incarcerated. No more 'doctor' for the sweet Miss Quinzel. Scribbled in red ink under her name, an officer of the GCP had added 'aka Harley Quinn'. The sight made Crane sigh. The last thing Harleen needed was encouragement.

She had insisted that her evaluation would take place in her old office. Dr Arkham had insisted he'd sooner have it take place in the car park for fear she'd booby-trapped the place. Crane had compromised and so the bland room used for basic therapy was now dressed up in what could be easily moved down the corridor from Harleen's old office. In the end all he could convince the orderlies to shift was a rather battered chaise longue, the smallest of her filing cabinets and a vase of dead sunflowers that nobody had bothered to tidy away. Placed in the white room, Crane had thought it looked even more bleak than before.

14:37

He was more than five minutes late as he rounded the corner to Therapy Room 3b and could not help but wonder if Harleen would comment on how unlike him it was to be late. He wondered if he'd laugh at the irony. Stalling as he straightened his tie again in front of the door, Crane tried to clear his mind of everything he felt about Harleen Quinzel and put on a professional face. His palm was sweaty as he clasped the door handle, the one memory he had tried so hard to bury swimming to the surface with a vindictive clarity.

In his mind, it was Christmas again and the Joker's name had yet to be uttered within the asylum walls. Cheap, metallic tinsel had been lazily strung up by the orderlies throughout most of the hospital in an attempt to fill the damp building with an air of seasonal cheer and the old ballroom from the building's days as a mansion was host to a Christmas tree too large for the small number of decorations scouted from the back of a seldom used cupboard. The Arkham Trust had organised their annual fundraising party for a Friday evening and unable to refuse the summons of his superiors, Crane had donned his second-hand tuxedo to shuffle around the ballroom just long enough to be spotted before slipping back to his office where the week's paperwork waited in a tall pile on his desk. Using only a small desk lamp for light, Crane's eyes had begun to hurt after a couple of hours but the prospect of the ballroom kept him in place with his work; after all, anything was better than a crowd of nosy investors and faked Christmas-spirit.

It had been nearing midnight when Harleen Quinzel had flounced through the door to Crane's office, rousing him from the half-conscious doze he had been taking on Nygma, E.'s file. Even in the dim light of Crane's sanctuary, Harleen had sparkled. The silver sequined dress she wore would have looked incredibly gaudy on anyone else but she wore everything from her loose-fitting lab coat to her Friday night boots with a confidence that made her infallibly beautiful. Crane hadn't seen the beauty at first. Tired and stressed, he had fixed the blonde intern with a cutting look that washed straight over her.

'You're missing the party, Jonathan.'

'I don't care for the frivolity,' he had replied curtly, rising to shut the door on her face. As he had approached, he had seen the pink leaking into her eyes, the absent smile on her face. Harleen Quinzel had either been enjoying the Christmas party or had been hating it so much she had turned to drink in the hopes of blocking it out. Either way, she had been drunk. Crane remembered inspecting the glass in her hand; sour mash on the rocks – it had surprised him. To him, Harleen had always seemed the sort of bleach blonde girl who painted her toenails pink and drank ridiculous pink cocktails overloaded with sparklers and drinks umbrellas. In fact, she had seemed just like the girls he had known in high school – all hair dye and glitter to cover their true monstrous nature. He had remembered Lucy Carter teasing him over his second-hand clothes; Polly Oakes calling him a 'four-eyed geek'; Sherry Squires laughing in his face when he asked her to the prom. He had remembered them all and had hated Harleen for their crimes.

'You're a kill joy,' Harleen had told him, her taunting tone sugar-coated, 'you're a Scrooge.'

Crane had grasped the side of the door, trying to usher her back through it but Harleen did not move.

'But you are not the ghost of Marley, so kindly get out Ms Quinzel.'

Harleen had smiled. Crane did not scare her for all his superiority and the alcohol in her blood only made her more reckless. At least that was how Crane would later rationalise her.

He had been closing the door when Harleen had pressed herself to him, the warmth of her body paralyzing Crane for long enough that she could raise herself onto her toes and crush her lips against his. The last thought Crane could remember before Harleen Quinzel became his universe was that the bourbon on her tongue should have made her kiss sharp but she had tasted of honey and in that moment Crane had been lost. In that moment his existence had begun and ended in Harleen, the ditzy blonde who embodied everything that had suppressed him and everything that he had hated. She had bewitched and intoxicated him but in seconds she had been gone. The warmth of her body and the sweet taste of her kiss had been removed and she had stood, the same drunken intern as before, with a little smile on her face, unaware that she had started a time bomb within Crane.

'Merry Christmas, Dr Crane.'

She had left the office without another word, taking the light from the room and leaving Crane stood in the doorway to the dank office. In her wake, a thousand feelings had flooded back to the 'kill joy' doctor. He suddenly remembered why he cared that Lucy Carter had teased him; why Polly Oakes' words had stung him; and finally he remembered why he had even asked Sherry Squires to the prom in the first place. Unrequited attraction had bred a cage around the heart of Jonathan Crane and surrounded by tacky decorations and unhinged criminals, Harleen Quinzel had broken it free.

After that night, Harleen had never shown any sign that anything was different between them.

One month into the New Year, the Joker had been admitted.

Nine months after he had brought into the asylum, Harleen had helped break him out and joined him on what the news kept calling a 'deranged crime spree.'

Stood outside the door to Therapy Room 3b, Jonathan Crane sighed, pushing his glasses back into place with his middle finger before turning the door handle.

'Jonathan.'

Her voice cut straight through to his heart.


	2. Every Word A Dagger

Harleen Quinzel was a poorly processed mess. Though they had got her into asylum scrubs, it seems the guards had managed little else. Draped over the chaise longue like a doll that a bored child had tossed away in a tantrum, she struck a horrific picture. Her blonde hair fanned about her head in a matt of tangled curls like a devil's halo; while smudges of white greasepaint that no one had cared enough to remove bled down her face. She looked like the trash Dr Crane found in ever drugged-up killer's file under 'victims' and yet, as she turned her head toward the door and smiled, he found her disarmingly beautiful. Out of her ruined clown face, her blue eyes still shone bright, wide as a child's. Her smile, though now sober, was as warm as Crane remembered from his office doorway the Christmas before and, for a moment, it paralyzed him. Gripping the door handle until his knuckles turned white, Crane fought to silence his heart – to convince himself that this was merely just another criminal to evaluate. By the time he finally made his way to the table in the centre of the room, he had almost started to believe it.

With agonizingly patient movements, he unloaded his briefcase, setting each item out with the precision of a surgeon's assistant preparing their instruments. He slid a blank cassette into the archaic recorder and with more force than the task required, pressed on the start button. The cogs of the tape had turned fifty time before Crane spoke.

'Patient 0603216, Quinzel, Harleen F. Session one, November 12th, 2:44pm. Dr Jonathan Crane PhD evaluating, also assigned psychiatrist.'

'Patient is also under investigation in the case of the people vs. Mistah J.' Harleen added in a mockingly serious voice before she gave way into giggles – the noise a helpless marriage of desperation and insanity.

Crane looked at her, the disgust rising in his stomach and heating his blood. He was above her in every regard – intelligence, restraint – her faults fell against his merits again and again; and yet, it was the faulted and flawed harpy that had snaked her way under Crane's skin. She was a cancer destroying him from his core – despised and inseparable all the same. Crane could not decide which he hated the most – Harleen for her infecting imperfection or his own weak resolve for crumbling in the face of one bourbon-tainted kiss.

His hate settled into a cold reserve as he watched the disgraced siren choke her laughter with a bite to her bottom lip – the stark white of her teeth an insult to the ragged skin – raw and flecked with black where some careless person had attempted to remove her lipstick.

'Do you know why you are here, Dr Quinzel?'

Harleen stared at him, her smile gone. Raising herself up from the couch, she spread her palms out on the desk, levelling up to her former boss.

'We've known each other almost two years,' she stated calmly. 'When are you gonna start calling me Harley like everybody else?'

And then came the giggles again, shaking the moulding asylum air with their cheer. Crane clenched his fists to control his desire to reach across the table and shake her. She could not be so simple, so corruptible, that the painted madman could destroy her so completely. He could not stand the idea of wanting a person so weak.

'I do not think I have known you at all,' Crane replied, tone cool. 'You are not the same intern I believed to know when you first arrived at this asylum.'

Harleen's giggles waned, falling into a pitying smile.

'New and improved, sweetheart. I'm happy now.'

'You're a liar.'

Harleen blinked at him. She had clearly not expected a tough love approach in her former domain. If Crane was honest, it had not been his intention. He had planned to give her the most basic of evaluations and flee, and yet, to see her, so misguidingly content, Crane struggled to remain disinterested.

'A puppet may smile but that does not mean it cease to feel the nails holding his strings in place.'

'A bullied child might grow up to be in charge,' Harleen replied, voice now as cold as Crane's, though her smile remained. 'Doesn't mean he doesn't feel as alone.'

The tape recorder spun, its mechanical hum drawing out the silence as four globes of blue warred, unblinking. When Crane spoke, his professional curtness faltered, broken down with the hurt he could not express.

'Why, Harleen? Why did you help the Joker escape?'

Harleen didn't seem to notice.

'Because I love him.'

Her answer was simple and said with such conviction that Crane could not doubt her sincerity. It was another blow that he felt rip through him.

'And you believed he loved you?' Crane asked, turning his eyes downwards as he began to write in his notebook – his words carefully selected and sculpted. He had known Harleen's notes to be rushed and illegible – unable to keep up with the flow of madness she encountered and the tide of her own ambition.

'I know he loves me.'

Crane stopped writing. Her words were at odds with the battered body she uttered them from. Looking up, he resisted the urge to stare into her eyes and inspected the four long bruises on the right of her neck before his eyes darted to their brother on the left. They were the most recent in view though he knew from glancing at her file that they were not alone. Under her faded scrubs, Harleen Quinzel was an artwork of black and blue, her left arm bound in gauze – a blank square waiting for the artist's signature.

'Dr Quinzel, please state the full date of today and the season we are in.'

'A cognitive test?' Harleen asked, barely able to keep the scoff from her voice. It brought an air of her old self to her features – an indignant self-worth in the face of being doubted. 'I'm perfectly able to reason and remember. I know what life was like before the Joker. Everyone in this place looking at you like you were dirt under their feet – as if you couldn't possibly be smart because you were pretty and popular. It's not like that with the Joker. He shows you what the world is really like and it makes you laugh until it hurts.'

'He lied to you. Everything you think he showed you about the world, it's all a lie.' The anger shook in Crane's voice. The Joker had laughed at the civilized world and held up Harleen as his punch line – the deluded prophet of mental abandon. She was the archetypal spoilt brat, who, when the world failed to meet her expectations, had sought out a way to make it bend to her whim. But her escape had been in her captor and now Crane saw just a battered shell of a girl – too proud to forget her past life and too caught up with insanity to come back.

Harleen had tensed with his words and now trembled, her aquamarine eyes glimmering with the fire in her blood.

'You just don't understand love. It changes your world, Jonathan.'

And then she simply fell back onto the chaise longue, an absent smile on her face as if she had already forgotten the conversation. There was nothing more Crane wished to hear, and as his gathered up his belongings, the sting of her words settling into the furrows of his brow. He did not look back as he left the therapy room, each step he took now weighed down with every word Harleen had uttered. He did not love her, of that much he was certain and yet the idea that she might have one day broken through the ice that abuse and neglect had formed on him had been his glimmer of hope in the darkness. Harleen had come to closest of everyone Crane had ever met to believing he could love – that he was not simply an emotionless loner, driven by his work. She had believed enough to dare a kiss almost a year ago and yet now, she too found him unable of love. It made him believe the world might be right; and as he slunk into his office just a floor away from Harleen Quinzel, Jonathan Crane felt the most alone he had in years.


	3. The Deepest Cut of All

When the fight broke out, the guards knew immediately where to find Dr Crane. The administrator had not been home since the Joker's escape, and though he had claimed to make use of the on-call rooms, everyone knew the closest he had got to a bed was the moth-eaten sofa in his office where a suit jacket might serve for a blanket. As half of the night shift tried to break up the disturbance, the other half drew straws to pick the unlucky man to rouse their boss. The youngest of their group was selected and with slow strides he had made his way to Dr Crane's office – praying the man already awake. His knock was greeted with an onslaught of fatigue-fuelled abuse but on relaying what had been happening in the shower blocks, he found the psychiatrist fell silent. Within moments, Dr Crane was through the door, dressed (though sloppily), and hurrying down the hall with a resolute expression. The young guard stood a moment, staring after the boss that grew stranger every day before he too followed towards the commotion, struggling to keep up with Dr Crane's long strides.

Crane found the scuffle without the need for his trailing goon. The shrieks radiated through the old building so that it could be heard from the floor above and below. There were three voices, all doing their best to dominate the argument while the guards' pleas for peace fell flat around them. The first voice belonged to one of Dr Crane's own patients – a deluded college student who had been committed following an attempt to blow her biology class sky high – screaming of naivety and betrayal with such conviction that Crane was sure someone had roused her demons. He could not place the second voice, screaming insults at the other two; but the third he knew better than his own. Harleen was crying as much as she was shouting, her voice breaking on every word but still she kept on.

As Crane rounded the corner into the shower block where the three women yelled, he found a horrific scene in front of him. The guards had succeeded in pulling the women apart but still they lashed out, struggling to be at each others' throats. Crane's eyes fell immediately on Harleen, her naked body bearing fresh bruises amongst her tokens from the Joker. The bandage from her wrist had been pulled away revealing a poorly stitched gash that had begun to bleed again in the confrontation. Harleen hardly seemed to notice, as she continued with tirade of abuse against the others.

'Get them back to their rooms!' Crane snapped at the guards as he crossed the threshold into the shower block, his gaze fixed intently on Harleen.

Sensing that he only meant those he paid no attention to, the guards holding the first two inmates tightened their grip and marched the women, still screeching, from the room. They were still soaked through and they trembled as they were walked into the cold corridor. Their towels and clothes were left behind in favour of fetching new ones as far from Dr Crane's wrath as possible. Though the malice in his eyes when he observed the spat had surely been for the inmates, the guards themselves did not fancy being caught on his bad side.

With the other two gone, Harleen stopped screaming and slumped in the guard's grip until he let go of her completely, allowing her to curl up on the tiled floor. Crane waved the guard out of the way, crouching down beside her at a loss for words. The mocking disinterest that she had shown in their session just a few days earlier, was gone; replaced with a despair that seemed to cleave her in two. Crane felt his own heart wither at the sight of it, all the hate he had been nursing since their last meeting seemed to disappear, leaving him completely with the sigh he gave. Taking a towel from the bench, Crane silently wrapped it around Harleen as best as he could before he lifted her in his arms like a tired child and walked from the room, uncaring for the gossip that would surely follow. Exhausted from the scrap, Harleen could not object and simply lulled her head against Crane's chest as they walked, the tears still falling down her cheeks.

When they reached Crane's office, he set Harleen down on the couch before busying himself looking for a shirt that she could wear, trying not to look at her. The adrenaline that had coursed through him on finding her in such a state had begun to wane, leaving him embarrassed and unsure of how to act. Thrusting a shirt that had been lying crumpled on his chair into her hands, Crane turned to face the window, allowing Harleen a little modesty, even if it seemed a bit late for the nicety. While he had imagined her nude a hundred times since they had kissed, he could only find repulsion at seeing her so badly beaten. It was typical, he supposed, that he should finally get his wish, only for it to leave him wishing he never had.

When Crane turned back around a few minutes later, Harleen had composed herself somewhat and sat awkwardly holding the towel around her wrist, drowned by the size of his shirt despite the fact he was rather scrawny himself. Her eyes darted up as she heard him move and she offered a small, sad smile – the tears still drying on her skin. For a moment, all her madness seemed to have disappeared, leaving the Harleen Quinzel that Crane had first known. He came to her side like a fly in a web, unable to resist her pull despite how much he may have liked to. Taking her arm, he removed the towel to examine the cut – bile rising in his throat as he looked at it. The wound was jagged and deep – only just missing the ulnar artery. It had been stitched with everyday sewing thread by unskilled hands and Crane could tell it was close to becoming septic unless someone took a proper look at it. It must have been causing her agony, but Harleen kept a brave face.

'What happened?' Crane asked, fumbling with his spare hand to find a bottle of antiseptic in his drawer.

At first, he thought she hadn't heard him. When she did finally speak, Harleen's voice was quiet and reserved, drained of all her energy.

'I thought he didn't love me,' she began, staring at the wound as Crane started to clean it, wincing slightly as the sting of the antiseptic hit the broken skin.

'He was in such a mood – he kept ignoring me, and then he just... snapped. Started screaming at me, saying I didn't get it – didn't get _him_. I didn't know what to do. I mean, there was nothing I could come back to, not after all of that. So I grabbed one of his fancy knives... it all happened so quick after that. He stitched me up himself and bandaged it and I knew he loved me. I'm dumb and plain and he's so magnificent and yet he wants _me_. He couldn't let me die because he loves me.'

Crane's grip tightened on her arm and he became less careful about how he treated her injury. His blood boiled in his veins but he did his best to remain calm. He could have throttled her for her stupidity – God knows she would have been happier to have her brains dashed out there and then on the office floor than sit in her cell rotting, knowing the Joker was never coming back for her. But he couldn't do it. For all the hate she made him feel, Crane knew there was no greater hell for him now than the world without her in it.

Harleen looked up, her ever-innocent eyes meeting his as she chewed nervously on her bottom lip that had begun to swell from the fight in the shower block.

'What's going to happen to me?' She asked, voice barely more than a whisper and laced with true terror.

Crane understood her then better than he would ever have with all the therapy sessions in the world and he held her to him, willing the universe to change around them. Harleen cried freely in her fear and Crane remained with his arms around her until her tears ran out and she could hardly breathe. When she had composed herself somewhat, Crane called for a guard to return her to her cell and stared out of the window as she was guided out. He spent the next half an hour tearing his office apart before, with bloody knuckles, he collapsed into his chair, sobbing like a condemned man though no tears managed to escape.

Harleen Quinzel was completely sane, and unredeemable. She would rot in Blackgate when they sentenced her or escape to be with the clown but either way her fate would carry her far away from Crane. His mind was full of scenarios of what could have been and has he fell into an uneasy, haunted sleep, Crane could only think that he might have saved her from all this had he only acted sooner.

* * *

><p><strong>Author's note: I realise the ending is somewhat confusing but rest assured, it'll be explained in more detail in the next chapter.<strong>


	4. A Flower for a Soul

The basement of Arkham Asylum was cold and dark – the air dank and stale; and yet, in this dismal place, Jonathan Crane found solace. Away from the constant stream of depression and insanity, he was left with only his own thoughts, finding them more sinister than the madness on the floors above. He could not remember the last time he had slept and dark circles had claimed his eyes for their own. He fancied himself unrecognisable – a stranger stalking the halls like a condemned man with a mask of stubble. The staff whispered about him, barely concealing their contempt. His carrying off of Harley Quinn had not gone unnoticed and now the Arkham personnel regarded the administrator with suspicion, wondering what exactly he was up to with the corrupted inmate. He paid their concerns little notice.

Shadows dipped and bucked over Crane's face as he studied the television set left to rot in the basement in its disuse. He had agreed to watch the tape to offer the police whatever advice he could, and now the Joker's face illuminated his own through the television like a horrific Jack-o-Lantern – mocking him with its eternal grin. The Joker's presence in Crane's sanctuary was unwelcome but still he could not turn off the tape. Instead he stared into the madman's dark eyes, desperate to see deeper, to see his soul, to see what Harleen must have seen to drive her into his arms. All he found was cruelty and despair. The news reports were brief, the Arkham footage distorted – there was nothing Crane could offer the police and less he could offer himself. Harleen was their only key to understanding the Joker but she would never tell them what they needed to know, of that he was sure.

Turning away from the screen, Crane felt the crushing grip of his frustration seize him again. He despised Harleen to her very core – he despised her unwavering devotion to the Joker; her weak moral code; and he despised the way he saw her face every time he closed his eyes. She was burned into him and he hated her for it – cursed her very existence for it. Each day since her arrival back to Arkham in chains, his hatred had grown and with it, his obsession. While he could scream from the rooftops his loathing of the battered harlequin, there was still a small voice, silenced before in his childhood, that wondered how much of him was hatred, and how much was love. It was this small voice that kept him from sleep – this voice that launched his anger at the Joker. He supposed it was his graving grace, his last chance at sanity, at least, if it could not be Harleen's.

In the cold basement, the tape whirred to its close, shaking Crane to his senses. The fire in his veins cooled, giving way to a weak despair. With trembling hands, he opened his briefcase, fumbling through the files to find the package he had tried to forget. It had been the second unremarkable package to arrive on his desk, six months after the first, with no postage or return address, in between sessions when he had believed his office to be locked. The first had contained one of Crane's own published papers and a single dried blue flower, wrapped in tissue paper. He had been perplexed at first, but on seeing the paper that the sender had included, he had found himself struck with a mix of dread and excitement.

'_Hallucinogens, and their role in the understanding and acceptance of fear.'_

He had known at once what the flower was for and had leapt into preparing it with little moral restraint, fuelled by his college interests that the working day at Arkham had stamped from him. He had selected a test subject from his own patient list and dosed him with the entirety of the compound, posed as a gifted cigarette. The poor wretch had clawed his own eyes out.

When the second package had arrived with its mass of blue flowers and Crane's paper on the use of fear in warfare, he had hidden it away, simply pretending it did not exist. Now he sat with the abandoned gift in his lap, wondering if he dared to put it to use. On the final page of the paper, a spiky hand had scrawled a promise in red ink:

_30% of what a city would pay to save its mind._

The offer that had once seemed unthinkable slipped under Crane's skin as he stared at the page until his eyes began to water. Images slowly filled his mind – a city cowering in fear and himself above them, wielding the power. His entire childhood, he had been kept at heel, with fear and rejection; now he had a chance to level the playing field and take control. He did not know who the packages were from, but it mattered very little to him. With a feverish speed, he restarted the tape; staring into the Joker's eyes, willing the darkness to eat up the blue of his own. He could break Gotham, break this painted clown... He thought of the city at his feet and of Harleen, broken and wounded, making her way up from the rubble like a phoenix, finally in her right senses. That kind of power could crush her idolatry of the Joker and turn her to love him as she once considered before the madman widened her perspective.

For what could have been hours, Crane stood, temptation holding him unmoveable. As the dawn rose above him, he slowly eased himself into a chair, exhausted. What at first had seemed so perfect now looked bleak as the noise of normality filtered down from the asylum above. He had no way of knowing if the offer was genuine and even if it was, should anything fail, he would simply be another broken inmate in the cells, long forgotten by Harleen. He was to provide the threat for a ransom demand – a _threat _and nothing more. His employer would not want to see the city as he did, torn apart at the very seams by fear – they merely wanted the means to do it so that they might never have to use it as they all got rich. Crane's own ambitions were nothing more than a boyish sort of fantasy.

Walking the halls, his muscles aching and throat dry, Crane kept his eyes downcast, ignoring everyone he passed. When he reached the door he wanted, he paused, straightening his tie and pushing his slipping glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. He was a doctor, once a well-respected one at that, and he had a duty to uphold, however much it pained him. Scanning his security key, the door opened and Crane dragged his feet down the corridor to the last cell in the row. Behind the glass, Harleen sat with her back to him, pulling her long hair into pigtails. At first she did not notice him, so Crane simply watched her in silence, committing each last detail to memory. When she turned, her eyes were full of tears that she was fighting to keep back and she smiled sadly at him.

'You know what tomorrow is, don't you?' She asked quietly.

Crane nodded. He had been able to keep sight of Harleen's impending court date when all other days had blurred into one. He was due to take the stand and tell the court whether or not Harley Quinn was mentally competent. While it mattered little for her verdict, his word would determine the sentence Judge Faden settled on her head.

'You're not crazy, Harleen,' Crane murmured, the words stabbing his throat as they were spoken. 'You might put on a good act but that doesn't make it true.'

She stopped fighting the tears and cried openly, scrambling to press her palms against the glass and stare up into Crane's eyes.

'Please,' she begged, 'you can't let them take me to prison. I'd die in there, Jonathan, you know it.'

Swallowing the sorrow that threatened his already-flaking professionalism, Crane spoke, his tone so soft he wondered if she would even hear him. 'I have to.'

Harleen sobbed, sinking down onto the floor of her cell, her head turned away from him. She cried until her breath came in spasms and she fell silent, Crane wondering if she had cried herself to sleep. As he turned to leave, however, she spoke.

'I remember, y'know,' she began quietly, 'that Christmas party – I remember it.'

Her words stopped Crane in his tracks and he stood, his back to her, hardly daring to take a breath. He heard her move in the cell, knowing she had turned to face him again.

'I messed up, Jonathan. But I can fix it. Keep me here, we can work something out – we can be together...'

'Don't.' Crane spat, his teeth clenched and his hands balled into fists. She was playing him, and he could not stand to be mocked. 'Tomorrow I take the stand and I won't lie for the sake of a twisted little whore like you.'

He did not look back as he made his way back down the corridor and away from the cells, almost running in an attempt to silence his emotions. She had offered him everything he wanted and nothing of it all the same. When he reached the gate, he stopped, barely able to catch his breath. Tomorrow he would condemn Harleen to her fate and tomorrow he would seal his own.


	5. Revolutions

'And this is your full, professional opinion, Dr Crane?'

The man in the witness box was silent a moment as his eyes scanned the courtroom, settling on the defendant. Her eyes were turned imploringly upwards to him, barely containing tears. They shared a gaze for just a second, the witness' hands clasped in his lap, his palms sweaty.

'It is.' He replied quietly, turning back to the DA, expression empty.

* * *

><p>Jonathan Crane stood on the platform that lurched out over the asylum basement, watching his red-clad drones as they assembled the laboratory. A heavy hand clapped his back in goodbye, its owners voice echoing in the dark long after he had left.<p>

'You've made the right choice, Dr Crane.'

He wondered if he had. At first, each new shipment of blue flowers weighed down on him, crippling him with doubt. Now he barely felt anything in regard to the deal he had struck; the construction of the secret lab was just another part of the working day.

The asylum had changed a lot in the year since Harleen's sentencing. Staff that Crane trusted to do the right thing had been sent on their way, replaced with those who kept their heads down and asked no questions. Inmates became less psychotic and more calculating – more of Falcone's men filtered in through the twisted iron gates and more of the helpless were sent on their way to Blackgate. The very last drops of colour had been drained from the Arkham family legacy.

'You should get a plant or something,' the new voice in the blackness suggested, 'brighten the place up.'

A smirk tugged at the corner of Crane's mouth. How little she had changed after everything. He turned to face Harley Quinn, just visible in the dim light. She still wore the asylum scrubs though he hardly knew why – she had been granted free reign as soon as the deal with the League had been agreed and yet she still insisted on dressing like his prisoners. Her hair was in the pigtails he found ridiculously childish but she had at least consented not to return to the stark white greasepaint. She had not uttered the Joker's name in a year. Not while awake, at least.

'What would you suggest?' Crane asked, humouring her as she leaned over the railing to examine the progress in closer detail.

She paused, the silence singing of all the blood red roses she had been gifted by the Joker after each beating. Then, like a small flame in the night, older memories filled the air. The memory of the Joker melted away until all she knew was her old reflection – an ambitious intern trying the brighten the dark around her.

'Sunflowers,' she breathed. 'Sunflowers are beautiful.'

Crane held out his hand and she came to him, not obediently, but willingly. Each day was a little victory. He was edging towards total power and Harleen was moving in time with him. One day, Gotham would be theirs.

From his pocket, Crane pulled a blue flower, still a healthy bloom despite its long journey. He tucked it into her pigtail, brushing his thumb against her cheek as he looked down at her. Her eyes were alert and bright, her mind the same. This time there was nothing to cloud her judgment.

'Merry Christmas, Dr Crane,' she whispered.

The smile pulled again on Crane's face as she lifted herself up onto her toes.

'Merry Christmas, Harley,' he breathed against her lips.

The universe began again.


End file.
